ALVINZA HAYWARD.

 

            ALVINZA HAYWARD lived about the most even life of any of the famous men who won and lost on the Comstock. He was an Argonaut. When he looked first upon the Golden state he was six feet in height, strong and brave, and looked like one who had come to conquer. From the first his thought seemed to be that the legitimate work of a man in California was mining; that everything else was secondary employment. He made some money in the placers in Amador county, but the great mother lode ran by his door, and he was irrestibly attracted to it. He had assays made from it, and though he knew nothing about quartz mining, or the reduction of gold ores, he knew that the simplest form was to crush ores by stamps, then to wash the pulp, and if the ores were free a fair proportion of the gold could be saved.

            So he crushed some pounds of the ores in a common mortar and then washed the fine pulp in a pan. In that way, by comparing what he could save from twenty pounds of rock, with the assays of 2,000 pounds, he could estimate what percentage of the ore in a ton could be obtained in a mill. In that wav he found that the ore was "free milling;" that is, it was not held in combination with some other metal that would carry it away with the pulp, as it was run over a quicksilvered plate. Then he had a crude mill built and found that he could make money much faster than in the placers, and so in the early fifties had accumulated what was then a great fortune and a high name among the business men of California. He really was working a mother lode bonanza.

            Then he devoted much of his fortune to many different enterprises. He was an original stockholder in the California bank.

            He was intimate with Ralston, Mills, and the others of the bank ; when Gorham and Jones ran for governor and lieutenant governor, he formed a great attachment for J. P. Jones as almost any man would, for there was never but one J. P.

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Jones and we suspect that he advised Jones to go to Nevada, and helped get him the place of superintendent of the Crown Point mine in which Hayward was a heavy stockholder.

            In the mines in Amador, Mr. Hayward was always dressed as a miner with gray shirt, overalls and miners' boots ; in San Francisco he was always attired like a gentleman of leisure and finely groomed, and altogether an attractive-looking man of affairs. He was indeed a real captain of industry.

            As the Crown Point progressed under the management of Jones, Hayward stood behind him, he being the controlling stockholder, and as the indications pointed to a bonanza sure, bought more and more of the stock until when in a very few months the stock jumped from 50 cents a share to $1,800, both men became several times millionaires. That bonanza gave up, if we remember rightly, something over $33,000,000.

            When Air. Hayward began to grow rich in Amador, he started to help his fellow miners when they were in trouble. The amount of these loans, which were generally gifts, only the books in the Beyond can ever reveal. Certainly Alvinza Hayward never knew the sum.

            This he kept up all his life, one result of which was that he had mining interests in many places.

            In a certain district in Placer county, "drift diggings" were found. In the immemorial past a river had threaded its way through that region.

            By some mighty convulsion of nature this river was covered deep by overturned mountains. Its source was turned in some other direction and the ancient bed of the river was buried.

            In a few places, through the erosion of the years, the mountains covering the dead river had been worn down, leaving exposed small portions of its bed.

            This bed was often several feet deep in gravel which was rich in gold and when the bed rock was reached it was often fabulously rich.

            When found the only way to work this was by drifting up stream -- for it was filled with water running the gravel out on cars and washing it outside.

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            Mr. Hayward had some interests in the camp, but another man had an extremely rich section of the old stream and in a few months took from it $1,500,000.

            Then he went east on a visit. In New York City, at the home of a relative, he met a beautiful and most brilliant young- lady who was poor and was earning her living by teaching.

            She had quarreled with her sweetheart the very day before she met this miner who had just made $1,500,000. He was carried away at the first sight of the lovely girl and in two weeks sailed from New York for California with her for a bride.

            Reaching San Francisco, her husband offered to buy her any home that she might select, but she told him it was a contract for life, that while he remained a miner she intended to be a miner's wife, so she went with him to their wild camp in the high Sierras and remained there three years. There she sometimes met Mr. Hayward.

            Afterwards they went to Auburn, built a fine home and remained there until the husband died.

            In addition to the first stake of $1,500,000, the man took another million from the old river bed ; but he knew nothing about business ; he invested his money in a hundred schemes, and when he died his wife found that there was nothing left but the home and the "remnants" of the old mine. She went back to the old camp and looked it carefully over and then went to find Mr. Hayward in San Francisco. She called upon .him and told him that she had come to him to borrow $10,000, maybe $15,000.

            He smiled and asked her what her plans were, for he knew that her husband had left her next to nothing.

            Then she unrolled before him a map or map and sketch combined, and asked him if he recognized the place. He looked long at it and then said. ; "It is as the camp was fifteen years ago."

            "That was when I made it," she replied. "You made it?" he asked.

            Then she explained that when a young girl she used to make caricatures of every teacher that she did not like, and

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every boy that she found looking at her in school. That when her late husband found her in New York she was teaching mathematics and drawing; that when her honeymoon began to wane up in that mining camp, to occupy herself she began to sketch the camp.

            "But," she added, "look closer, Mr. Hayward! Do you see these lines? They represent the old river bed, from this point (touching the map) up and down. My husband worked out the bed above as far as he could follow it, and found that the fall averaged twenty feet to the mile. Then he went below and started this tunnel (tapping another line) to strike the old bed in 700 feet.

            He ran it 50 feet, and then the upper river bed was paying so much that he put all the men to work there and never resumed work on this lower tunnel. I want the money to drive that tunnel 200 feet more, to strike the channel."

            "Suppose you do not strike it?" asked Mr. Hayward.

            "But I shall. I must," was the reply. : 'My children and myself cannot get along without it."

            "What do you know about mining?" asked Hayward.

            "Did I not work three years in those mines?' she asked, and then added : "Please keep in mind that I am no common miner. I am a mining engineer. Look at that map!"

            "Well," said Hayward at last, "such pluck as yours deserves recognition. Draw on me for all you want !"

            The lady made good ; paid him back every cent and had something 1 left for herself and children. I can not tell her name for the children were still alive when I last heard from them, though their mother is dead. Everyone in Auburn will know whom I mean.

            As Mr. Hayward grew old he became a great spiritualist, a sort of Uncle Jesse Knight, for rumor has it that Uncle Jesse dreams out bonanzas; but Mr. Hayward's spirits came out flat-footed and told him what mines would do.

            The late Charlie Lane found or obtained an option on the Utica mine at Angels camp in Calaveras county, Cal., and went at once to Mr. Hayward for help. Hayward was then an old man. but the Utica was on the mother lode ; he looked at the

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samples Lane had brought (whether the spirits approved I do not know, but Hay ward did) and told Lane to go ahead, and in the next six years the mine made them both what would have been great fortunes before the Comstock was found. He made his first and last fortune on the mother lode, and though he made more money on the Comstock than he did in California, his first love was for that same great lode that plows its way for three hundred miles through the Sierras ; which has made so many people rich and which, its friends believe, holds yet in its course vastly more than it has so far given up.

            Mr. Hayward was one of the first to demonstrate its possibilities; it made him a millionaire when millionaires were rare objects in this old world, and he in return made it clear to the men of California that the quartz of the state would many times make up for the vanishing placers.

            Mr. Hayward died a few years ago in San Francisco.

            We do not know of one reproach that followed him out into the Beyond.

            He came to California and single-handed forged out a fortune for himself and made it from the hills ; no other man was made poorer by it, rather while he was wresting it from the stubborn rocks, his life was a blessing to those around him : he kept his brain alert to find where he could be of use to his fellow men and his heart always open and generous.

            At the same time he was a shrewd business man; if he was ever foolish with his money it was because he intended to be. Among as sharp men as ever battle for fortunes either through the legitimate channels of business or by desperate plunging on the stock market. Mr. Hayward never lost his head nor his temper, but moved easily among them, saved what he had made and added to it.

            He believed in the invincibility of work ; his love for California and his desire to see the great state exalted were grand passions with him ; he was one of the very strong men of the Golden State for more than half a century ; and among: those who changed the great state from its barbaric glory in 1849 to its enlightened splendor of today, not one did nobler nor higher nor more effective work than Alvinza Hayward.